Like many parents, I’ve been waiting with mixed emotions for my kids’ school to announce their plans for the Fall. I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t be sending my middle schoolers for in-person instruction right away and that we’d probably have a remote learning option. But many questions remained.
On Wednesday evening, I eagerly joined our school’s virtual town hall. For an hour, the Head of School walked through their plans to try to successfully teach hundreds of fifth through twelfth graders remotely and possibly in-person. A flurry of parents’ questions filled the chat box, and several of them caught my eye because they all shared a common theme:
How do you know that this approach will be effective? I don’t want to be taking chances with my child’s education.
Back in March, when schools shut down, teachers were forced to shift from classroom instruction to remote learning in a matter of days. (And remember how we thought the kids might be back in school within a couple weeks!?) Most schools were unprepared to make such a shift so abruptly or to see remote learning through until the end of the school year. The suddenness of it all put us in a place where we were patient with technical challenges, understanding when bumps in the road happened, and accepting of the piecemeal approaches that many of us experienced. School administrators and teachers were scrambling to do their best with wildly unusual circumstances, and most parents were willing to accept that.
The start of school in Fall 2020 is a different story.
Schools have several months of remote learning under their belts. They’ve had an entire summer to model various scenarios, plan for what school might look like, and to be innovative and adapt their technologies and approaches.
Parents’ expectations now are higher, and that was reflected in the questions they were asking in the chat box. They wanted certainty, not risk. And they wanted assurances.
Certainly there is merit to expecting schools to be more prepared for the Fall than they were in March. But, we as parents also need to shift our mindsets to best help our schools, teachers and kids during what surely will be a challenging and unusual academic experience.
<img class="sqs-image-min-height" src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc04634e8b3ad2e02482fcb/1596210593554-UYUBN01035H3FZT2W312/image-asset.jpeg" alt="" loading="lazy"/> But, we as parents also need to shift our mindsets to best help our schools, teachers and kids during what surely will be a challenging and unusual academic experience.
We all need to adopt the mindset of experimentation and embrace it as necessary and positive. The concern expressed by parents around taking chances with their kid’s education conflates taking chances with engaging in experiments. Events occurring by chance are, by definition, ones that occur “in the absence of any obvious design.” Approaches to fall instruction at schools largely are not happening without any design or forethought.
Instead, administrators and teachers are, essentially, starting with hypotheses, such as:
- A structured school day, even for remote learning, is best.
- Giving every student a school-issued device will lessen technical difficulties.
- High schoolers are most likely to use video appropriately, so only they will have access to that option.
- Pairing up students and mentors will improve student engagement and mental health.
Then they are testing those hypotheses by:
- Having a structured school day where students must be online at certain times for certain classes.
- Providing students with a school-issued device to use instead of ones they have at home.
- First giving high schoolers the ability to display their video.
- Creating a student mentorship program.
The hope would be that administrators and teachers then observe and measure how these decisions play out and whether their hypotheses were accurate. If they weren’t, then they dig into what was wrong about their assumptions and make adjustments that reflect what they’ve learned. And then experiment and measure again.
This process is the core of scientific experimentation, but has its application far beyond the laboratory. Experimentation requires humbleness. It requires acknowledging that we do not know if we have the right answer. When it comes to the success of our children’s education, of course we wish we did have the right answers and that our schools did as well. But absent that option, the next best one is to be honest about what we know, form theories and try different things to gain better understanding, measure the results, and adjust as we need.
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”
William Blake
Shifting our mindsets to one of experimentation is not just important for the upcoming school year, but for our responses to all that is changing in the economy, civil society, and our communities. We do not have all the answers for how to get people back to work, save small businesses, mend racial tensions, improve community bonds, but we can draw from the principles of experimentation to seek them out.
Given the magnitude and novelty of challenges we face, we will need many, many experiments. And, we need experimentation as used by entrepreneurs — informed, quick acting, numerous, data-drive, and agile.
Decades ago, Peter Drucker introduced the idea that corporate managers should behave like scientists in labs — analyze data without bias or without outcomes in mind, and study it not only for risks to business but opportunities for new products or services.
This ideal was further honed through the Lean Startup method of entrepreneurship in which experimentation is a core mechanism by which a new business can develop quickly and with greater likelihood of success. The Lean Startup method famously “change[d] everything” and now the concept of experimenting and pivoting is central to entrepreneurship and innovation.
<img class="sqs-image-min-height" src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc04634e8b3ad2e02482fcb/1596212198491-FO7N1YOVI4BRPJDAV6JG/image-asset.jpeg" alt="" loading="lazy"/> Given the magnitude and novelty of challenges we face, we will need many, many experiments.
The time to move the language and practice of experimentation from the networks that know it well to a much wider network is now. We must acknowledge we do not have all the right answers, generate as many experiments to find those answers, provide those who need it with the resources to unleash those experiments, be willing to accept and adjust when things do not go as planned, and celebrate and share when things do.
The more experiments we try, the more likely we are to find the solutions, perhaps most importantly the ones that are unexpected.
With so much at stake — including our kids’ education — no one wants to take chances. Instead let’s start experimenting.